Regionalism

Very pleasing Written Statement from the Communities and Local Government Minister Baroness Hanham It revokes the Regional Strategies for the West Midlands, North West and South West.

She says:

Subject to Parliamentary ratification, this completes the abolition of every Regional Strategy in England, thereby fulfilling an important Coalition Agreement objective and ushering in a new era of true localism across England. This is a milestone moment for planning and localism in this country. From now on, every local community in England will have more control over local planning and development.

The top-down approach of Regional Strategies from the last Administration imposed centrally set building targets on communities and coincided with the lowest peace-time levels of house building since the 1920s.

The abolition of these unpopular and counter-productive Regional Strategies reinforces the importance of councils’ Local Plans produced with the involvement of local communities, as the keystone of the planning system. It is this approach that will help deliver the homes, jobs and infrastructure we need.

Lots of bad Government policy is due to the requirements of our membership of the European Union. Politically there is not much benefit to Ministers in pointing this out, of course. "Don't blame us we don't have real power," is hardly a rousing declaration for the electorate. (Unless, of course, it were to be combined with the offer of a referendum on our membership of the EU....)

However there is also a lot of "gold plating". A craven willingness to conform to EU guidance which does not have the force of law. Then go even further just to be on the safe side. Often we see this overzealous approach to the EU in our town halls as well.

Thankfully the Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles takes a robust approach. Here is on with a written statement, on the sort of statistics that the EU wants us to collect:

I am pleased to see the Government are taking a further step in abolishing unelected regional government in England, with proposals ending regional statistics.

The consultation states:

“The primary focus of statistical data collection in the Department is at a local authority level. However when publishing data we usually provide statistics at a range of geographic levels typically Local Authority, Statistical Region and an England total.

"The abolition of the Government Office network at the end of March 2011 was central to the Government's wider aims of transferring power from central government to local councils and local communities. In the Government’s view, the nine offices were an inefficient tier of government based on arbitrary boundaries rather than representing the areas that citizens most identified with or areas with common economic problems and market conditions or the most sensible boundaries for coordinating more centralised government functions, such as fire and resilience. The Government Office boundaries were the same as those for statistical regions defined using the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), as defined in European legislation.

On ToryDiary yesterday Paul Goodman reviewed Eric Pickles' impressive early actions and the five big challenges he still faces.

Today the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has completed his abolition of Labour's sprawling regional bureaucracy. Already axed were Regional Development Agencies, Regional Strategies, funding for Regional Leaders’ Boards and the Government Office for London.

Also going soon are all eight remaining Government Offices for the regions. This completes Mr Pickles' first round of money saving and his determination to devolve power to the lowest possible level of local government.

The Secretary of State's full statement is published below.

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The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles):

In our first two months in government we have demonstrated our commitment to localism, decentralisation and rolling back regional government in England. We have announced the abolition of Regional Development Agencies, abolished the Regional Strategies, ended funding for the Regional Leaders’ Boards (the successors to the Regional Assemblies) and are closing the Government Office for London.

We have taken these steps because they are right in principle and as part of a fundamental transfer of power from central Government down to local councils and down further to local communities. We have done so to reduce spending on bureaucracy and protect front-line services against the backdrop of an unsustainable budget deficit and national debt.

We do not believe the arbitrary government regions to be a tier of administration that is efficient, effective or popular. Citizens across England identify with their county, their city, their town, their borough and their neighbourhood. We should recognise that the case for elected regional government was overwhelmingly rejected by the people in the 2004 North East Referendum. Unelected regional government equally lacks democratic legitimacy, and its continuing existence has created a democratic deficit.

In the Coalition’s “Programme for Government” we said we would consider the case for abolition of the eight remaining Government Offices.

I am announcing today the Government’s intention in principle to abolish the remaining eight Government Offices, subject to the satisfactory resolution of consequential issues through the Spending Review.

The final decisions on the future of the Government Offices, including arrangements for closure and for the transfer of on-going functions, will be made at the end of the Spending Review in the autumn.

The Government Offices are not a legal entity. They act on behalf of 13 Government Departments and are staffed by Civil Servants from these Departments. Communities and Local Government is the biggest contributor to Government Offices providing 41% and 33% of funds and staff respectively in 2010/11. The Home Office; Departments for Education; Business, Innovation and Skills; Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Transport are also employers of Government Office staff.

We are making good progress with our programme of radical reform to reduce the burden of bureaucracy on local authorities and businesses, including removing the inflated local government performance regime and doing away with the unnecessary regional tier. Consequently many of the functions Government Offices undertook are no longer necessary. By announcing our intention in principle now, we will further progress our programme of reform, allow staff, councils and departments to take account of this, and make an earlier start in the Spending Review on securing savings for the public purse.

I believe that the original intentions behind the establishment of the Government Offices for the Regions (to join up different Departmental teams outside London into a ‘one stop shop) have been lost. Such functions are no longer necessary in an internet age and given the Coalition Government’s commitment to genuine decentralisation and devolution of power.

There are, however, some Government Office functions, such as arrangements for resilience and civil contingencies, which will need to continue. The Spending Review process will be used to test which activities currently carried out by the Government Offices should continue, and to decide the most cost-effective on-going arrangements.

The Spending Review will also consider arrangements for the redeployment or release of Government Office staff, and for sharing as appropriate the savings, costs, assets and liabilities arising from the decision.

We should be clear: the Government Offices are not voices of the region in Whitehall. They have become agents of Whitehall to intervene and interfere in localities, and are a fundamental part of the ‘command and control’ apparatus of England’s over-centralised state.

The new Government is set to finish off the last vestiges of unelected Regional Assemblies, handing power back to local councils and saving the taxpayer up to £16m a year. The last Government made an empty promise to axe Regional Assemblies.

In fact in April, Assemblies re-emerged, stealthy re-branded as Local Authority Leader Boards. Like Assemblies, these Boards wrested powers on transport, housing and planning powers away from local councils. This is one of a number of spending promises made since the new year that the Coalition Government has reviewed.

The main function of the eight Boards that exist across the country is to oversee regional control. However, ministers are committed to scrapping the complex and confusing regime of Regional Spatial Strategies meaning Local Authority Leader Boards are also redundant.

Ministers have put plans in places to move swiftly to dismantle the funding and powers of Local Authority Leaders Boards leaving councils free to organise themselves and work together as they choose. As well as cutting off the hefty annual budget, the decision will save local taxpayers money too as Boards also received funding from local councils - more than £10 million last year.

This will see local authorities put firmly back in the driving seat when it comes to making decisions. Local people will know that the people they elected are responsible for delivering the services and provision they want for their area and will be able to hold local leaders to account if things fall short without them passing the buck.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles says:

“This is another step in wresting control from the bureaucrats, stopping the top down diktats and axing unelected, ineffective quangos.

“The previous government created a self-perpetuating stream of regional bureaucracy where plans required strategies that require boards and bodies.

“We are unravelling this complex system, putting the community back in charge of how their area develops and saving the public purse £16m at the same time.”

The Government plan to "replace" Regional Development Agencies. Glyn Gaskarth says they should simply be abolished.

The UK Government has an almost £160 billion annual budget deficit. Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) cost around £2 billion per annum. They should be abolished because they have failed to meet the two objectives they were originally set.

These were:

1. To increase the rate of economic growth in all the English regions. With the exception of London and the South East, the regions experienced higher economic growth (per head and in total output) in the seven years preceding the RDAs creation than in the seven years after.

2. To reduce the disparity in economic growth rates between regions. The Centre for Cities reveals that RDAs have failed to achieve this. During the first seven years of the RDAs existence (1999 to 2006), the Greater South East economy grew by nearly 18 per cent. The rest of England's economy grew by just 15%. Therefore the gap persists.

In fairness the RDA website does not claim to have achieved the objectives the agencies were originally set. Instead it lists ten ‘success’ stories to highlight their good work. A selection of them is contained below. Regrettably these stories reveal waste rather than achievement. They are available in full here.

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance welcomes Conservative local government policy getting more edge - but he wants more details

It’s taken a while for the election debate to move from providing mood to meat, but at last we are starting to hear some more details about what might happen in local government should David Cameron be elected Prime Minister.

This weekend alone there have been two items of pretty good news about the Conservatives’ plans.

First, Caroline Spelman unveiled plans to change the law so that council officers would need a proper warrant to raid people’s homes. This is a great step – particularly given the recent findings of Big Brother Watch that over 14,700 (and perhaps as many as 20,000) officials currently have invasive powers of entry to private residences.

The growing scope of the state to barge into homes has caused unnecessary and outrageous disruption to people’s lives and has harmed the reputation of councils as a group. Putting such raids back into a legal structure that properly respects privacy and individual freedom is an important step to rebalancing the relationship between the people and councils.

It is important to note that this policy is not only right, but it is also in keeping with the principles of localism. Critics of localism often suggest that it requires there to be no Westminster policies at all. However, this is a good example of Westminster’s proper role in setting the overarching terms of how local government operates – not by meddling in individual councils’ policy decisions but by laying down a sensible legal structure to protect the rights of the individual and ensure that all are equal under the law.

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers' Alliance suggests that councils looking to save money could start by withdrawing their funding of the unelected regional assemblies.

With a recession putting downward pressure on tax revenue and upward pressure on welfare spending, all councils are, or ought to be, looking for savings. Ditching their financial commitments to Regional Assemblies is a great way to save money and help to hasten the end of the Government’s failed regionalisation agenda.

Even had the North East referendum in 2004 been successful, the Assemblies would have been a costly white elephant of questionable value. As it stands, the things are simply unaccountable talking shops with no mandate whatsoever from the people. Given that the Government has finally committed to shut them down by 2010, and that the Conservatives have long been opposed to them, they have no real political mandate either.

With Labour and Tory policy committed to getting rid of the RAs, why are most councils still paying subscriptions and nominating representatives to attend the meetings? The Assemblies are on quango death row, but sizeable amounts of taxpayers’ money is still being paid to them in subscriptions.

Nick Vaughan is an elected member of Herefordshire Council in the only urban ward held by the Conservatives, a Director of the Young Britons' Foundation and former National Chairman of Conservative Future.

Conservatives should support the de-centralisation of power to lowest possible level.As for the Regional Development Agencies, the elimination of some of their powers - or their entire organisation for that matter - should also be welcomed, but only to a limited extent. Conservatives should also recognise that a blanket, one size-fits-all approach should be avoided at all costs.

Some RDAs do a decent a job. I have seen plenty of evidence of this in conversations with council colleagues from across the UK during my annual trek to Party Conference. And if their local authorities are indeed working well with them, they should be kept.

Once upon a time my own RDA, Advantage West Midlands, was known by colleagues as "Disadvantage West Midlands" - and for good reason. There were terrific amounts of structural funding which were left unspent in our county. This was partly the blame of the then administration and those in their offices in Birmingham.

However, our RDA has since proved itself. We have since secured funding for a significant number of infrastructure and regeneration projects. But more importantly, AWM has gone to great lengths to improving its working relationships with local authorities throughout the region.

As such, while I am against the cutting up of the UK into regional, bite-size chunks, as part of the European federalist ideal, we must own up sometimes and congratulate those agencies which have performed well in their areas in which we serve. It is too easy to bash agencies across the board when in fact some are doing a good job. Very often now, they relieve the pressures on planning teams, which are sometimes ill-equipped, have poor expertise and are inadequately staffed to deal with complex planning applications for example.

A friend of mine who is a property developer is very concerned about simply stripping regional planning powers from all agencies. I understand his concerns. How can he expect some of the less equipped and more reactionary councils to properly consider visionary ideas, which are often rejected purely on ‘NIMBY’ reasoning? Or because the required time to consider such applications has not been forthcoming?

Abolishing some RDAs - and scrapping certain powers of RDAs over issues like planning - is right. But across the board abolition? No. That isn’t very Conservative is it?

Many Conservatives thought that they had more or less killed off John Prescott's misguided and wasteful regional agenda with the defeat of plans to amalgamate police forces two years ago and the heavy defeat of proposals for a North East Assembly in a referendum held in November 2004.

However, there is one regional project that trundles quietly along - consuming huge amounts of money, massively over budget and significantly behind schedule - a project that the Labour Government cannot bear to abandon as it would involve unprecedented loss of face but for which there is next to no demonstrable evidence that it would make much or any difference were it to be aborted. A project bereft of champions, lacking political will or leadership at either local and especially national level.

That project is regional fire control centres. The Government's Fire Control project involves closing down all 46 fire service emergency control centres in England and creating a network of regional control centres. The latter were originally due to come on stream in 2006/2007 but it is unlikely that the first one will be operating for at least two years (i.e. late 2010).